About this episode

Kent Beck discusses his impact on software engineering and the evolving role of engineers in the age of AI.

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Few have made as big an impact on software engineering as this week’s guest on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent Beck. He created Extreme Programming, pioneered test-driven development (TDD), co-created JUnit, and is one of the authors of the famous ‘Agile Manifesto’. But these days, he's re-examining many ideas for the age of AI, and says we’re failing to accumulate trust during this new era at the same high rate as new code is being accumulated. In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent and I dig into his journey from discovering Smalltalk in the early days of personal computing, to helping define modern software engineering practices. We explore the origins of TDD, design patterns, Extreme Programming, and Agile – along with some lessons learned at Apple and Facebook. Kent explains why he believes software engineering is about…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Kent Beck

Topics covered

• software engineering
• test-driven development
• Agile methodology
• AI in engineering
• Extreme Programming
• design patterns
• technology shifts

Keywords

• Kent Beck
• software engineering
• test-driven development
• Agile
• Extreme Programming
• AI
• design patterns
• technology shifts

Sponsors

Antithesis, turbopuffer, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Apple, Facebook

Books & works: Agile Manifesto, Extreme Programming, JUnit

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